Hacker News: kavalg

New comment by kavalg in "HackerTube: YouTube built from videos recommended by HN"

kavalg — Mon, 02 Nov 2026 06:04:26 +0000

My kind persona: Cool! We all need this!

My cynical persona: Now sit and wait for the advertisers to start infesting HN with recommended videos :(

My pragmatic persona: Sounds like there may be some law related issues such as

- "Then we wrap it up in a YouTube UI" -> probably violating copyright. I can't help but remember that episode from Silicon Valley, where Dinesh dumped the company to Galvin to get rid of the COPA violation

- "I had to create some kind of API key from Google Cloud UI to query YouTube for video metadata" -> probably in violation of some ToS already

New comment by kavalg in "Scaling Hierarchical Networks"

kavalg — Fri, 30 Oct 2026 07:13:05 +0000

Good questions. I guess we will never know unless someone with enough money and data tries the approach on a larger scale.

New comment by kavalg in "Scaling Hierarchical Networks"

kavalg — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 17:02:13 +0000

Their premises are:

- If you work with the raw bytes in a non-hierarchical (isotropic) model, such as a byte transformer, you get better transfer to downstream tasks, but at a huge computational cost.

- if you use a tokenizer (pretrained or regexp based), you gain a lot of computational efficiency, but loose semantics and the transfer to downstream tasks may degrade

- finally, with H-Nets you get the best of both worlds. The model learns how to chunk the data in a better way than a hardcoded/separately trained tokenizer

Authors also demonstrate that this approach works in other modalities, such as DNA sequences and images, where we don't normally have lots of ready to use tokenizers.

New comment by kavalg in "Microsoft offers mass buyouts for roughly a quarter of its workforce"

kavalg — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 07:54:05 +0000

50/50 is bad enough

New comment by kavalg in "Sebastian Raschka's from-scratch video course on building reasoning models"

kavalg — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 15:46:41 +0000

Highly recommended! Sebastian does a great job explaining complex AI topics in a very intuitive way.

New comment by kavalg in "Google open-sources TorchTPU, a native PyTorch back end for TPUs"

kavalg — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 06:46:12 +0000

While I have the same sentiment, I am also curious why a competitor can't accelerate their developments with AI. In the end, hardware development is to a large extent also software development. Is it the patents that NVIDIA has that are preventing this? Or maybe some trade secrets? AFAIK the NVIDIA hardware is manufactured entirely by TSMC.

New comment by kavalg in "France's supermarket fridges were vulnerable online for months"

kavalg — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 06:24:43 +0000

These are two different things. For example, it is possible that the fridges connect to a central, more secure MQTT endpoint to report telemetry and receive commands. They don't have to be discoverable on the internet. Also, not setting up a VPN, given the fact these vulns were known for so long is pure negligence.

New comment by kavalg in "France's supermarket fridges were vulnerable online for months"

kavalg — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 09:44:56 +0000

yes, but why do they need to be exposed to the internet?

New comment by kavalg in "Programmable pigments: Photochromic nanoparticle inks for rewritable tattoos"

kavalg — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 06:54:16 +0000

You guys are so funny :)

New comment by kavalg in "The gap in shared understanding of LLM capability is widening"

kavalg — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 06:48:40 +0000

The most subtle thing to me is who has stake in the game. It is true that humans make mistakes too, but they would generally strive not to damage money-generating software/hardware infrastructure. If we remove all they people that actually understand how the system is working (up to a level of abstraction), how will the ambitious PO (or whoever is driving the AI) be safe from ruining the whole thing or simply landing in a deadlock situation where one agent wants to make the change (e.g. dev agent) and the other agent is refusing (QA agent)? I guess we are still trying to find the right level of abstraction and only evolution will show where it is.

New comment by kavalg in "Singapore govt dating app uses Gale-Shapley stable marriage algorithm"

kavalg — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 08:05:08 +0000

This quote shall really resonate with all of you who use Tinder similar dating apps: "Commercial apps need you to keep swiping but this app is designed to get you off the platform. Singapore built the first dating app whose success metric is deleting its own users".

New comment by kavalg in "Pre-Greek: The lost language hidden within Ancient Greek"

kavalg — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 08:34:58 +0000

Even for a non-linguist like myself, the article didn't feel right. I expected to find more information about the Thracians, who inhabited those lands for quite some time and left some extraordinary (albeit non-written) heritage.

New comment by kavalg in "Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang"

kavalg — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 08:14:23 +0000

Since when has intelligence had a strong relationship to status and respectability? I've met intelligent people that don't get much respect or status either because they don't look good, are shy or they don't have money.

New comment by kavalg in "Productivity isn't about going faster"

kavalg — Tue, 12 May 2026 06:09:08 +0000

True, but the relationship is certainly not linear and not a Markov process. Also, the $$$ a company makes are rarely directly translated to incentives for developers. I remember a case where a company was doing an OK engineering/product job, but had problems with sales. Then a new sales driven CEO came into place and for the next 3-5 years the company had great financial results, while at the same time eroding the engineering culture (who cares if money is flowing anyway). Then that guy left and the next CEOs had to take care of the mess.

New comment by kavalg in "Mike: open-source legal AI"

kavalg — Fri, 01 May 2026 06:23:49 +0000

How come? the github page says the license is MIT.

New comment by kavalg in "Microsoft and OpenAI end their exclusive and revenue-sharing deal"

kavalg — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 05:12:32 +0000

I kind of agree with you at this point. When ChatGPT was rapidly gaining popularity I thought that they will eventually replace search (esp. for shopping), which would have given them a huge ad revenue. Maybe they could have even tried social networking e.g., to help you sort out the huge flow of information that today's social networks are and get to the important/rewarding/whatever posts. But now ChatGPT is kind of getting commoditized. I would even dare say that gemini feels to me a bit better now, so the search route for ChatGPT is clearly gone.

New comment by kavalg in ""Roadrunner": a bipedal, wheeled robot for multi-modal locomotion [video]"

kavalg — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 15:52:44 +0000

Yes, I can imaging that a robot chef holding a knife improperly is already dangerous enough even if it does not move (e.g., what if you trip and fall against the pointed knife)

New comment by kavalg in ""Roadrunner": a bipedal, wheeled robot for multi-modal locomotion [video]"

kavalg — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 06:08:18 +0000

Cool! Does anyone have a list of challenges that must be tackled before such humanoid robots become usable for tasks such as household chores, cooking etc?

New comment by kavalg in "FSF statement on copyright infringement lawsuit Bartz v. Anthropic"

kavalg — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 08:16:16 +0000

It looks like the stance of FSF is for proliferation of the copyleft to trained LLMs

> "Therefore, we urge Anthropic and other LLM developers that train models using huge datasets downloaded from the Internet to provide these LLMs to their users in freedom"

New comment by kavalg in "ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did"

kavalg — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 10:20:56 +0000

In Azimov's Robot series the society that chose to live with robots gradually destructed itself by just living longer and not having so many children. The other part of humanity that avoided robots flourished (not without suffering). But that all required new planets for settlement (I am looking at you Elon).